Somebody waited for old Charley Grimes,
plodding across that darkside Luna
crater—somebody who couldn't exist.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Winter 1948.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Charley Grimes was a big man who had been everywhere in the SolarSystem and collected trophies which were as strange and shining as thestories he liked to tell.
His face was as gaunt as the jungle mask and, when he lit a pipe andsmoked it, you watched to see where the smoke would drift. It wasn'thard to picture it drifting over the mountains of the moon or acrossthe flat red plains of Mars.
We were sitting around a campfire in the Rockies just as our ancestorsmust have sat five hundred years in the past. We were swapping yarns toget Charley started, and watching the sun sink to rest on clouds shapedlike wild mustangs when the talk drifted to the dark side of the moon.
You know what it's like on the dark side. The brittle stars shine downand the great craters loom up, but when you're flying low in a rocketship about all you can see through the viewpane is a circle of radiancespotlighting a desolation as bleak as the Siberian Steppes.
You miss so many things you don't dare even think about the earth.If you're an escapist you cover your bunk with pictures of the lushVenusian jungles and pretend you're somewhere else. But if you're arealist you go outside and come to grips with the bleakness in one wayor another.
Charley was a realist.
"So I went wandering off just to see what I could find!" Charley said.
We watched him get up, throw another log on the fire and draw hisIndian blanket around himself—so tightly he looked like a greatswathed mummy swaying in the glare.
"Nothing tremendous ever happens when you go exploring with all thetrimmings!" Charley went on. "You've got to be devil-may-care about it.So I just made sure my helmet was screwed on tight and went stridingaway from the ship like a clockwork orang-outang!
"If you've been on the dark side you know that there's a sensation ofbitter cold at all times—even when you're bundled up and in motion.You keep looking back and wishing you hadn't—and before you can countthe stars in a square foot of sky you're at the bottom of a valley withglacial sides and the desolation is so awful you want to sit down onthe nearest rock and never get up!"
Charley sat down, crossed his long legs and took a deep, slow puff onhis pipe.
"I shouted—just to hear the echoes come rolling back. You can talk toyourself that way and get comfort out of it, because what you'll hearwill be the giant in yourself. The valley was so big a soaring eaglewould have burst its lungs trying to fly out of it.
"But don't get the idea I climbed down over an icy slope on a rope. Isimply sat down and let myself slide. Smooth? There wasn't a crevice ora projection until I reached the bottom and picked myself up."
Charley nodded. "I had to lift off my helmet for a minute, to shake offthe ice. That's when I shouted and heard the echoes come rolling back.
"I'd clamped the helmet back on, and was adjusting my oxygen intakewhen I happened to glance down at my big, square feet."
Charley chuckled.
"I've got outsized feet even when I'm as bare as a baby. But I waswearing heavy moon-shoes, and the prints I'd left in the snow wereeight inches across!
"There was a straight line of prints, as big and square as my own,leading out across the valley—prints I couldn't possibly have made.I'd stumbled around a bit, of course. But I hadn't budged two yardsfrom t